A commonly asked question among people looking at a Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 installation is “why is the WinSxS folder so big?!” To answer that question I need to first describe componentization, and how components...

With each new release of Windows, it's a challenge to balance keeping the OS footprint small with maintaining forward compatibility for applications and devices. The .Net Framework is at the heart of this challenge. In Windows 8, Microsoft decided to...

Hello, my name is Kevin Ledman. I am a Support Escalation Engineer in the Windows group and today’s blog will cover how to run the new Sysprep and Capture Task Sequence included with MDT 2010. If you choose to deploy an operating system manually or need...

Hello, my name is Manoj Sehgal. I am a Senior Support Escalation Engineer in the Windows group and today’s blog will cover “How to use Bitlocker Data Recovery Agent (DRA) to unlock Bitlocker Protected Drives In Windows 7, we have option to unlock...

Implementing highly available file servers in Windows Server 2008 is very different from how it was done in previous versions of Microsoft's clustering technology. One of the new pieces of functionality implemented in highly available file servers is...

Problem
Upon startup, Windows Vista Boots to a Black Screen with only the Mouse Cursor
Resolution
This is most likely due to the Remote Procedure Call service (rpcss) running under the LocalSystem account rather than NT Authority\NetworkService...

The Migratedatasourcedatafromdpm.Ps1 DPM Powershell Script is Included in Service Pack 1 of Data Protection Manager 2007. The MigrateDatasourceDataFromDPM is a command-line script that lets you migrate DPM data for individual “data source...

“Why can’t I have a drive bigger than 2 TB?” This is a common question. And as storage has gotten bigger and cheaper, I see it more and more. So let’s take a few minutes to talk about the mysterious 2 TB limit. There are actually three different...

Perhaps the largest call generator for the Core Team is for us to determine cause of a hard system crash that generates a Blue Screen and memory dump file. Commonly called a "Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)." The vast majority of these memory dumps...

Hello, my name is Emmers Presson. I am a Support Escalation Engineer for Microsoft in the Windows Core team. The purpose of this blog is to give you the steps to install a hotfix (or any other “package”) on the currently running operating system using...

With Windows Server 2008 R2 you can perform a Bare Metal Restore of a server that has suffered a catastrophic failure. That’s right you can restore a server without having to install the OS and then the backup agent. You just simply...

Many new computers are shipping with the option to boot Unified Extensible Firmware Interface ( UEFI ) instead of standard BIOS. In today’s blog I walkthrough how I installed Windows 7 SP1 X64 Enterprise on a Dell Latitude E6410 laptop that supports...

In this blog we are going to discuss about how we can decode and fix operating system crashes with Stop c000021a.
Below is the first screen you will see after POST, followed by the bugcheck information.
Here is the detail bugcheck information...

This is Vimal Shekar and Krishnan Ayyer from the Windows Support team. Today in this blog, we will be discussing about an issue that we are seeing increasingly being reported in support. We will look at the effects of removing .Net Framework from a Windows...

Often we have seen operating system hanging at Splash screen as seen in the screenshot below. For Windows Server 2003: For Windows Server 2008 and above: As the first troubleshooting step, you would like to boot into safemode and you would notice operating...

Recently I helped someone on an issue where the customer had a disk that was part of a Windows 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 Cluster. They could bring the disk online, but they couldn’t write to it. During the course of troubleshooting, they ran Diskpart...

Hello, my name is Manoj Sehgal. I am a Senior Support Engineer in the Windows group and today’s blog will cover How to enable Bitlocker in Windows 7 and avoid one of the most common issues we see when enabling Bitlocker using GPOs. A common problem...

Running sysprep
Today's blog will cover a common question we get with deploying Windows. The question usually starts as "How many times can I run sysprep"? While the answer is simple it requires a more detailed explanation.
When sysprep executes...

In today’s blog I am going to explain how you can do an unattended setup of the default Windows 8 Enterprise X64 install.wim to a Surface Pro from a USB drive. Unattended setups are not new but when you are deploying to the Surface Pro (or any other...

Today’s blog is regarding the expiration of the Windows 8.1 preview build which occurred yesterday January 15 th , 2014. If you installed the Windows 8.1 preview build and have not upgraded to 8.1 RTM you may notice that your machine is rebooting...

My name is Flavio Muratore and I am a Senior Support Escalation Engineer with the Windows Core Team. One subject we haven’t written much about in the Core team blog is “disk performance”. Today I would like to talk a little bit about measuring Physical...

Hello, My name is Manoj Sehgal. I am a Senior Support Escalation Engineer in the Windows group and today’s blog will cover “How to backup recovery information in Active Directory (AD) after Bitlocker is turned ON in Windows 7 and above.” In this blog...

Today’s blog will cover scenario where you would like to customize the Start menu and TaskBar(also called SuperBar) as part of your deployment. In Windows 7 the start menu looks like this The top 5 icons in the start menu are not customizable. Note that...

What is a Microsoft Failover Cluster Virtual Adapter anyway?
A question often asked is, "What is the Microsoft Cluster Virtual Adapter and what can I do with it?" The typical, and correct answer, is to leave it alone and let it just work...